One evening the week after Hurricane Katrina struck, the intrepid television correspondent Anderson Cooper was featured on the Charlie Rose show. Cooper was still on the scene in New Orleans, the inundated city in the background and a look of harried concern on his face. He told Rose that he had no intention of returning to his comfortable life in New York City any time soon. Cooper had been among the reporters to challenge official accounts that the situation was under control, based on the contradiction between disturbing images on the ground and government officials’ claims of a competent response effort. He seemed shocked and dismayed by what he had seen in New Orleans, but was also moved, even transformed by his role as witness to domestic catastrophe. He had covered disasters in Somalia, Sri Lanka, he said, but never expected to see images like these in the United States: widespread looting, hungry refugees, corpses left on the street to decompose. Toward the end of the interview, Rose asked him what he had learned from the event. Cooper paused, reflected for a moment, and then answered: “we are not as ready as we can be.”